In my previous post we took a look at Dinosaurus, a 1998 volume that I now know is essentially a compendium of the Looking At…Dinosaurs series, featuring much of the same dreadful artwork. (Thank you commenters!) For reasons best known to the publishers, artist Tony Gibbons – who was responsible for some of the weirder illustrations that appeared in the early issues of Dinosaurs! magazine in 1993 – was here let loose on dozens of pretty painful illustrations of dinosaurs,…
I was only a year old when BBC’s landmark series Walking with Dinosaurs first aired, but I have to imagine watching it in 1999 must have felt similar to the way I felt watching Prehistoric Planet this week. Not since then has the age of dinosaurs ever been portrayed so believably. For the first time in a big-budget media project we’re getting depictions of Mesozoic life that isn’t plagued by concessions and strange design choices. Feathers are commonplace. Multi-ton behemoths…
Our second trip to the Prehistoric Planet takes us to a series of desert landscapes, including the Gobi, North Africa and South America (twice). And in contrast with the first episode, it’s rather heavy on dinosaurs – as one might expect, given that a marine reptile flopping around in the sands wouldn’t look very dignified. Other creatures do significantly feature – pterosaurs, of course, and a little anonymous lizard chasing flies around the faces of sleeping Tarbosaurus. However, the dinosaurs…
On more than one occasion, I’ve bought an intriguing-looking old dinosaur book on eBay, only to find that it’s filled with artwork from an older book that’s already been featured on the blog. This would be one of those cases…almost. For you see, while an awful lot of the palaeoart in this book is recycled from 1992’s Gollancz Dinosaur Enyclopaedia for Children, there’s a significant amount of newer material here too, and given that it’s all from the same artist…
Ah, October. A month of transformation in these northern latitudes, as the last green of summer is sucked from the world and a final riot of color gives way to the gray and brown of winter. It’s always a big month in paleontology as well, as the SVP annual meeting and the newer tradition of TetZooCon fill our feeds with new discoveries and insights. In the US, Earth Science Week and the attendant National Fossil Day provide copious outreach opportunities…
Several years ago at LITC 1.0, I put up a post poking fun at the past-time of imagining prehistoric animals in one-on-one, Mortal Kombat style battles. I let my imagination fly and came up with my own wishlist of ludicrous match-ups: A hundred Mononykus vs. Carcharodontosaurus: They’d swarm the big brute and crawl into all sorts of uncomfortable places. Four strategically-placed Incisivosaurus vs. Giraffatitan: Two words: beaver style. Citipati vs. Gigantoraptor: I see the little dude running circles around Giganto…
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Chasmosaurus belli silhouette in custom bulleted list by Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, and Alan L. Titus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sourced from PhyloPic.